KT Cookie Co. founder returns to the Riverside shop

Wyatt opened the cookie shop at 1908 W. 13th St. in Riverside in 2004 and sold it to a couple in 2013.

“They decided that they didn’t have the time to give to the store,” she says. “Of course, I didn’t have anything to do, and I have to do something.”

She called her friends Judy Gomez and Squeek Crouse, who worked with her at the shop previously.

“I said, ‘We can go back,’ and they said, ‘When?’”

The store will be open on weekdays – and a few Saturdays during holidays – and will also serve lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. They’ll offer soups, sandwiches, casseroles and salads.

Wyatt, who is from that area, says she never was a baker growing up.

“I was pretty much a tomboy and not in the kitchen.”

She went into interior design, but as she started baking cookies for her children to take to school, she practiced her designing skills.

“It was just kind of a decorate-the-cookies type thing.”

In 2000, Wyatt baked cookies for a wedding for about 350 people.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “So I figured it all out and got it done.”

The shop followed. It officially reopens on Monday, but the women are actually in there now and starting to bake.